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Recordings

'Christine Brewer … combine opulent, blazing tone, fearless top notes and surprising agility' (The Daily Telegraph)'Christine Brewer in magisterial voice … a major project, beautifully performed and presented' (The Independent)» More

Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series is fast becoming a worthy successor to the seminal Schubert and Schumann Lieder sets on the label. This fourth volume features a veteran of these recordings, the great British baritone Christopher Maltman. Roger Vigno ...» More

Richard Dehmel was an important member of the expressionist movement, and in 1898 Strauss set a very varied selection of his poems to music, two of them, Befreit and Wiegenlied, becoming firm favourites in the repertoire. Leises Lied is a tiny gem of a song, unique among Strauss songs for the almost complete absence of a bass in the piano part. Instead the left hand shadows the voice, both seeming suspended from an ostinato of soft chords in the treble, the rapt mood coloured by an almost Debussyan suggestion of whole-tone harmonies.

We have a bed, we have a child,
my wife!
We also have work, the two of us,
and we have sun and rain and wind,
and we only lack one tiny thing
to make us free as the birds:
only time.

When on Sundays we walk through the fields,
my child,
and see far and wide above the corn
the glistening throng of blue swallows—
oh it is not a few fine clothes that we lack
to be as beautiful as the birds:
only time.

Only time! We can scent the brewing storm,
we peasant folk.
Only a short eternity to wait;
we lack nothing, my wife, my child,
except everything that flourishes through us,
to make us as happy as the birds.
Only time!

English: Richard Stokes

Trudging chords in a chromatic alternation of F minor/G flat minor underline the grey drudgery of the working man’s life, while trilling thirds represent the freedom to enjoy nature that he aspires to. All he lacks is time, but time he will never have. Hence the brooding figure in the bass that accompanies his refrain—‘Nur Zeit’. The whole song is developed out of the dramatic tension between these three figures, but by the end it is time (or lack of it) that wins, the bass motif finally reduced to a dismissive, contemptuous shrug.

As an operatic composer in the making, Strauss understood how the individual workman’s lot could be expanded (as Dehmel intended) to speak for the whole class. Hence the almost cosmic scale of the climax, anticipating Wozzeck’s cry of ‘wir arme Leut’’ (‘we poor people’) in Berg’s opera, but also exalting the working man’s aspiration for a freer existence.

You will not weep. Gently, gently
you will smile; and as before a journey
I shall return your gaze and kiss.
You have cared for the room we love!
I have widened these four walls for you into a world –
O happiness!

Then ardently you will seize my hands
and you will leave me your soul,
leave me to care for our children.
You gave your whole life to me,
I shall give it back to them –
O happiness!

It will be very soon, we both know it,
we have released each other from suffering,
so I returned you to the world.
Then you’ll appear to me only in dreams,
and you will bless me and weep with me –
O happiness!

Dehmel, not necessarily a good judge, expressed himself unsatisfied by Strauss’s setting of Befreit. But he did subsequently provide a clue to the question often raised as to the exact situation depicted by the poem. Apparently he had in his mind the image of a man speaking to his dying wife, but he also allowed for the possibility of a different interpretation involving the parting of two lovers. Whatever the case, Befreit is one of the greatest of Strauss’s songs, already in its piano part evoking the sonorous weight and emotional sweep of the Straussian orchestra, with its undertow of triplets and the figure of repeated brass-like chords that occasionally interrupts them. Continually anticipating the entry of the voice with a syncopated sforzato, like a momentary shudder in the earth’s foundations, this motif adds to the sense of impending change already established in the opening bars by the semitonal shift on the words ‘Du wirst nicht weinen’ and later with even greater effect at ‘Es wird sehr bald sein’. The long arching curves of the climax are worthy of the closing scene of an opera, and it is not surprising that the repeated phrase accompanying the words ‘O Glück!’ was later quoted by Strauss in Ein Heldenleben.

The storm eavesdrops on my family house,
my heart beats out into the night,
aloud; thus was I awoken, as a child,
by the raging forest storm.
My little boy, listen, listen:
into the distant peace of your cradle
the wind in a dream moans my words to you.

Once I too laughed in my sleep,
my son, and was not awoken
by the storm; till a grey night came,
as it did today.
The muffled sound of the Föhn roars today in the forest
as it did then, when I heard in its sound,
through fear, my father’s words.

Hark how the burgeoning in the lofty boughs
is tossed and bent from tree to tree;
my son, into the peace of your cradle
the storm vents its angry laughter, listen, listen!
It has never bowed in fear,
hark how it gasps through the tree-tops:
be yourself! be yourself!

And if your old father ever speaks to you,
my son, of filial duty,do not obey him, do not obey him:
hark how the Föhn in the forest is brewing the spring!
Hark how it eavesdrops on my family home,
my heart beats out into the night,
aloud …

English: Richard Stokes

Among Dehmel’s political activities was his membership of the so-called Sohn-Vater-Kampf, which encouraged the revolt of youth over parental authority, and contributed to the rise of expressionism. In this poem Dehmel, who had given his own father a hard time, doubles the stakes: recalling how as a boy he had not heeded his father’s words, he now urges his baby son when he grows up to ignore him in turn and be true to himself.

The piano unleashes the raging storm with all the orchestral resources at Strauss’s command—thundering octaves, rushing arpeggios and howling chromatic scales—and on such a scale that Strauss is reported to have said on tour: ‘It takes the devil to play that!’ Whether or not the text warrants the triumphant Tchaikovsky-like interludes and subsequent peroration is debatable. As a suitably heroic vision of the son’s future, however, it is undeniably effective, and as an exercise in musical hyperbole is hugely enjoyable to perform.